
HISTORY 



BY 



JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON 



PROFESSOR OF HISTORY 
COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 



THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1908 



HISTORY 



A LECTURE DELIVERED AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 

IN THE SERIES ON SCIENCE, PHILOSOPHY AND ART 

JANUARY 15, 1908 




HISTORY 



BY 

JAMES HARVEY ROBINSON 



PEOFESSOR OF HISTORY 
COLUMBIA XINIVERSITY 



THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 
1908 



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By THE COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS. 



Set up, and published March, 1908. 



HISTORY 



History itself has a long history, extending, in Europe, 
from Herodotus and Thucydides to the most recent discus- 
sions in the current numbers of the "Historische Zeit- 
schrift" and the "Moyen Age." The changes which have 
from time to time overtaken it during two thousand years 
and more, have left indelible impressions which can alone 
explain the peculiar plight in which this particular branch 
of knowledge finds itself to-day, with all its inconsistencies, 
incongruities and vagueness of purpose. As we have lis- 
tened to the clear and confident paeans of praise and 
thanksgiving which my predecessors in this course have'/ 
raised, week after week, it has become clear to me that 
"blessed is the science without a history." Chemistry, As- 
tronomy, Zoology, Physiology may have had a few errors 
of youth to live down, but they found themselves be- 
fore their sensibilities had been permanently perverted by 
unfortunate associations. With History it is different. It 
seems never to lose any habits once formed. It adds new 
ambitions while retaining its old ones, discredited though 
they may be. 

The story teller was probably the first to discover His- 
torj'-; at any rate it has been unmistakably epic from the 
beginning. Its purpose has usually been to tell a tale 
rather than to contribute to a well organized body of scien- v 

5 



tific truth. Indeed we shall not be far astray if 
we view History, as it has existed through the ages, 
even down to our own day, as a branch of gen- 
-eral literature the object of which has been to present 
past events in an artistic manner, in order to gratify 
a natural curiosity in regard to the achievements 
and fate of conspicuous persons, the rise and decay of mon- 
archies, and the signal commotions and disasters which 
have repeatedly afflicted humanity. Although the persis- 
tence of this primitive notion of history is so obvious as 
scarcely to demand illustration, it is interesting to note that 
as late as 1820, Daunou, a reputable French historian of 
his time, in a course of lectures upon the pursuit of history 
delivered at the College de France, declares that the mas- 
ter-pieces of epic poetiy should claim the first attention of 
the would-be-historian, since it is the poets who have cre- 
ated the art of narrative. Next, from the modern novel, 
the student may learn, Daunou continues, "the method of 
giving an artistic pose to persons and events, of distribut- 
ing details, of skilfully carrying on the thread of the nar- 
rative, of interrupting it, of resuming it, of sustaining the 
attention and provoking the curiosity of the reader." 
After the poets and novels, the works of standard histori- 
ans should be read with a view to surprising the secrets of 
their style— Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Polybius, 
and Plutarch; Caesar, Sallust, Livy, and Tacitus; and, 
among the moderns, Macchiavelli, Guicciardini, Giannone, 
Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, and Voltaire. When the 
foundations of an elegant literary style are firmly estab- 
lished the student may re-read the standard treatises with 
attention to the matter rather than the form, for, as even 
the judicious Daunou concedes, before writing history "it 
is evidently necessary to know it." Botli Daunou's pro- 
gram and his list of names— unquestionably the most distin- 
guished among historians throughout the centuries— tes- 



tify to the strength of literary traditions among historical 
writers. 

Yet a formal distinction at least has of course always 
been made between history and other branches of liter- 
ature. This is emphasized by Polybius, writing in the 
second century before Christ. "Surely," he says, "an 
historian's object should be not to amaze his readers 
by a series of thrilling anecdotes, nor should he aim 
to produce si^eeches which might have been delivered, nor 
to study dramatic propriety in detail, like a writer of 
tragedy. On the contrary, his function is above all to 
record with fidelity what was actually said or done, no 
matter how commonplace it may be." 

These warnings of Polybius were, however, commonly 
neglected by the ancient historian, whose object was to in- 
terest his readers in the great men and striking events of 
the past, or to prepare him for public life by describing and 
analyzing the policy of former statesmen and generals, or 
to teach him to bear with dignity the vicissitudes of fortune 
by recalling the calamities of others. It is clear that these 
ends of amusing, instructing or edifying were to be at- 
tained mainly by literary skill rather than by painful his- 
torical research. 

To Thucydides, Polybius and Tacitus, history appeared 
to be purely human and secular. Its significance was con- 
fined to this world. To them any reflections upon the in- 
fluence of the gods or upon providence would have seemed 
quite out of place. But with the advent of Christianity the 
past began to take on a religious and theological meaning. 
The greatest of all the church fathers, St. Augustine, ap- 
pealed to history to substantiate and illustrate his theory of 
the two cities, one heavenly and one earthly; and his im- 
mortal work deeply affected the thought of Europe for 
centuries. Still more influential in determining the inter- 
pretation of history was a little manual of universal history 

7 



written, at Augustine's suggestion, by Orosius, one of his 
ardent disciples. This is directed against their pagan con- 
temporaries, who maintained that their age was accursed 
above all others, owing to the desertion of the ancient gods. 

The object of Orosius was to show that, on the contrary, 
a veritable carnival of death had preceded the appearance 
of Christianity. Accordingly, as he tells us, he brought to- 
gether, in the compass of a single volume, all the examples 
he could find in the annals of the past "of the most signal 
horrors of war, pestilence and famine, of the fearful devas- 
tations of earthquakes and inundations, the destruction 
wrought by fiery eruptions, by lightning and hail, and the 
awful misery due to crime." History thus became for 
Orosius, and for his innumerable readers in succeeding cen- 
turies, the story of God's punishment of sin and the curse 
which man's original transgression had brought upon the 
whole earth. 

But we need not expose ourselves to the hot and wither- 
ing blasts of Orosius's rhetoric in order to realize the 
salient contrast between his conception of history's purpose 
and usefulness and that of the classical Greek and Roman 
writers. In the old days the danger had been that Clio 
would fall into the way of aping her sisters, poetry and the 
drama, and of borrowing their finery. Now, she permitted 
herself to be led away blindfolded by theology, which was 
for so long to be the potent rival of literature. The Greek 
historians and the greatest of the Roman, Tacitus, were 
forgotten in the Middle Ages ; so the convenient pamphlet 
of Orosius served to distort Europe's vision of the past for 
a thousand years until Thucydides and Polybius came once 
more within its ken. But any influence that they exercised 
in reviving ancient ideals of historiography was far more 
than offset by the religious perturbations due to the Prot- 
estant Revolt. 

Luther discovered that history could be appealed to to 

8 



support his attack upon what he called the "Teufels Nest 
zu Rom" And not long after his death a group of Protes- 
tants compiled a vast history of the church— "The Magde- 
burg Centuries," as it was called— in which they sought to 
prove the diabolical origin of the papacy and the Roman 
Catholic Church. Cardinal Baronius replied in twelve fo- 
lio volumes, written, as he trusted, under the direct auspices 
of the Virgin Mary, in which he set forth "the calamities 
divinely sent for the punishment of those who have dared 
to oppose in their arrogance, or conspire against, the true 
church of God." For three centuries each party continued 
to suborn history in its own interest, and one must still, to- 
day, allow for religious bias in important fields of histori- 
cal research. Yet in spite of all its bitterness and blind- 
ness, religious controversies have stimulated much schol- 
arly investigation in modern times, and we should be much 
poorer if certain works of a distinctly partisan character 
had never been written,— for example, Raynaldus' con- 
tinuation of Baronius and, in our own days, Janssen's 
"History of the German People," and Pastor's "History 
of the Popes." 

To the authors of the "Magdeburg Centuries" and to 
Cardinal Baronius the great, obvious, determining histori- 
cal forces were God and the devil. Our conception of 
God, as well as our ideas of history, have been changing, 
however, since the sixteenth century and it i^ rare now to 
find a historian who possesses the old confidence in his 
ability to penetrate God's counsels and trace his dispensa- 
tions in detail. As for the devil few events can longer be 
ascribed to him with perfect assurance. 

The reversion to Greek standards of historical composi- 
tion represented by Macchiavelli and Guicciardini in the 
early sixteenth century became pronounced in the eigh- 
teenth. Gibbon, Voltaire, Hume, Robertson and others 
successfully re-secularized history and strove to give their 

9 



narratives of political events the ancient elegance of form. 
Moreover, since the middle of the eighteenth century, new 
interests other than the more primitive literary, political, 
military, moral and theological, have been developing. 
These have exercised a remarkable influence upon histori- 
cal research, radically altering its spirit and aims and 
broadening its scope. To take a single example, Montes- 
quieu's "Spirit of Laws" — first published in 1748 — reviews 
the past with the purpose of establishing a purely scientific 
proposition, namely, the relativity of all human institu- 
tions, social, political, educational, economic, legal and mil- 
itary. The discussions attending the drafting of the first 
French constitution (1789-1791) served to provoke a 
study of constitutional history which has never since 
flagged. 

In the nineteenth century people continued, as they 
always had done, to see their own particular interests 
reflected in the dim mirror of the past. One might know 
nothing of the modern varieties of historical interpreta- 
tion and yet be confident that there would be one discover- 
able corresponding to each of the main currents of thought 
and endeavor. Now among the most unmistakable phe- 
nomena of the nineteenth century were the rise of the spirit 
of nationality, the struggle for constitutional government, 
the enthusiasm for natural science, the doctrine of evolu- 
tion, the industrial revolution and the impetus which this has 
given to economic theory and the discussion of economic re- 
form. History was ready to serve all the causes here enu- 
merated, as well as some others of which there is no time to 
speak. 

Early in the nineteenth century the cosmopolitan senti- 
ments so conspicuous at the opening of the French Revolu- 
tion began to give way to the spirit of nationality which 
was awaking in the various European states, especially 
Germany. This almost immediately showed itself in a 

10 



new and highly characteristic interpretation of history. 
While I make no pretensions to understanding Hegel I 
am going to repeat a few things he said in his lectures on 
the philosophy of history, first delivered in Berlin in the 
winter of 1822-1823, for many people thought they did un- 
derstand him and were deeply affected by his teachings. As 
he looked back over the restless mutations of individuals 
and peoples, existing for a time and then vanishing, he was 
confident that he could trace the World- Spirit striving for 
consciousness and then for freedom, its essential nature. 
This Spirit assumes successive forms which it successively 
transcends. These forms appear in the peculiar national 
genius of historic peoples. The spirit of a particular peo- 
ple having strictly defined characteristics "erects itself," 
Hegel explains, "into an objective world that exists and 
persists in a particular form of religious worship, customs, 
constitution, and political laws, — in short, in the whole 
complex of its institutions and in the events and transac- 
tions that make up its history." The Persians, Hegel held, 
were the first world -historical people, for was it not in Per- 
sia that Spirit first began to attain an "unlimited imma- 
nence of subjectivity?" The Greek character was "indi- 
viduality conditioned by beauty." "Subjective inward- 
ness" was the general principle of the Roman world. 

Ingenious as this may be, it would hardly have formed 
the basis of a new gospel of national freedom and deeply af- 
fected historical interpretation, had it not been for Hegel's 
extraordinary discovery that it was his own dear German 
nation in which it had pleased the Weltgeist to assume its 
highest form. "The German Spirit is the Spirit of the 
new world," Hegel proclaims; "its aim is the realization of 
absolute truth, as the unlimited self-determination of Free- 
dom . . . The destiny of the German peoples is to be the 
bearers of the Christian principle." The supreme role as- 
signed to his countrymen by Hegel filled them with justi- 

11 



fiable pride. And was not his assumption amply borne out 
by the glories of Deutschthum in the Middle Ages, which 
the Romanticists were singing ; and, much more recently, by 
the successful expulsion of the French tyrant only a few 
years before ? That all this should combine to give a distinct 
national and patriotic trend to historic research and writing 
was inevitable. The great collection of the sources for the 
German Middle Ages,— the "Monumenta Germaniae 
Historica" — which was to become a model for other na- 
tions, began to be issued in 1826 and' for the first time the 
Germans became the leaders in the historical field as in so 
many others. Ranke, Dahn, Giesebrecht, Waitz, Droysen 
and dozens of others who began to devote themselves to 
German history, were all filled with a warm patriotism and 
enthusiasm very different from the cosmopolitan spirit of 
the preceding century. Throughout Europe history 
tended to become distinctly national, and an extraordinary 
impetus was given to the publication of vast collections of 
material. It is, however, hardly necessaiy to point out that 
national enthusiasm, even that of a German, has its dan- 
gers. It fostered some singular misapprehensions which 
Fustel de Coulanges and other more recent writers have 
rectified. Moreover we in America have allowed ourselves 
to be somewhat imposed upon by German erudition and 
have got into the habit of giving more attention to the 
Middle Ages and to German history than is really justi- 
fied by their relative importance. To-day we surely have 
more to learn from France than Germany. 

It was natural that this national spirit and the political 
and constitutional questions of the nineteenth century 
should serve to perpetuate the older interest in political 
history. This is the most ancient, most obvious and easiest 
kind of history, for the policy of kings, the laws they issued 
and the wars thejr fought have always been the matters 
which were likeliest to be recorded. Then the State is the 

12 



most imposing and important of man's social creations and 
many historians have felt that what was best worth know- 
ing in the past could be directly or indirectly associated 
with its history. Ranke, Droysen, Maurenbrecher, Free- 
man and many others deemed political history to be history 
imr excellence. In the historical seminar rooms of Johns 
Hopkins University Freeman's words, "History is past 
politics," are inscribed over the entrance. 

During the past thirty years a rather bitter conflict has, 
however, been waged in Germany between the representa- 
tives of the political conception of history and those 
who clamored for the recognition of Kulturgeschichte 
as entitled to an equal if not distinctly superior rank. Now 
Kulturgeschichte includes such matters as have hitherto 
been generally passed over in the routine of historical writ- 
ing and instruction. The fundamental and enduring intel- 
lectual, educational, artistic, and even economic conditions 
have been neglected, — so the advocates of Kulturge- 
schichte complain, — in favor of fleeting political and mili- 
tary events, court intrigues and futile diplomatic 
negotiations. While the aims of the Kulturhistoriker 
are necessarily rather vague at first, and his operations 
have not the precision of the scholarship represented in the 
narrower, traditional school, the justice of his contentions 
is too obvious to be questioned. We have an inalienable 
right to study anything we please in the past. If the ap- 
pearance and effects of Peter Lombard's "Sentences" 
appeals to us rather than the contemporaneous doings 
of the emperor Lothaire, it is not difficult to make out a 
case in favor of the theologian's importance. And surely 
the development of the German language in the eleventh 
and twelfth century is as important as the struggle be- 
tween Welf and Hohenstaufen. 

We have now reviewed the chief motives which appear 
to have influenced the greater number of historical writers 

13 



from Thucydides to Macaulay and Ranke. They all 
agreed in examining more or less conscientiously and criti- 
cally the records of past events and conditions with a view 
of amusing, edifying or comforting the reader. But 
none of the interests of which I have so far spoken can be 
regarded as scientific. To scan the past with the hope of 
discovering recipes for the making of statesmen and war- 
riors, of discrediting the pagan gods, of showing that Cath- 
olic or Protestant is right, of exhibiting the stages of self- 
realization of the Weltgeist, or demonstrating that Liberty 
emerged from the forests of Germany never to return 
thither,— none of these motives are scientific although they 
may go hand in hand with much sound scholarship. But 
by the middle of the nineteenth century the muse of history, 
semper mutahile, began to fall under the potent spell of 
natural science. She was no longer satisfied to celebrate 
the deeds of heroes and nations with the lyre and shrill 
flute on the breeze-swept slopes of Helicon ; she no longer 
durst attempt to vindicate the ways of God to man. She 
had already come to recognize that she was ill-prepared for 
her undertakings and had begun to spend her mornings in 
the library, collating manuscripts and making out lists of 
variant readings. She aspired to do even more and began 
to talk of raising her chaotic mass of information to the 
rank of a science. 

But history, in order to become scientific, had first to 
become historical. Singularly enough what we now re- 
gard as the strictly historical interest was almost missed by 
historians before the nineteenth century. They narrated 
such past events as they believed would interest the reader ; 
they commented on these with a view of instructing him, 
fortifying his virtue or patriotism or staying his faith 
in God. In a way it was not so very important whether 
they took pains to verify their facts or not. Indeed, the 
exact truth, when we are lucky enough to get a glimpse of 

14 



it, is rarely so picturesque or so edifying as what might 
have been. Still they did take some pains to find out how 
things really were— rt^i^ es eigentUch gewesen, to use 
Ranke's famous dictum. To this extent they were scientific, 
although their motives were mainly literary, moral or re- 
ligious. They did not, however, in general try to determine 
how things had come about— we^ es eigentUch gervorden. 
History thus remained for two or three thousand years a 
record of past events, and this definition satisfies the 
thoughtless still. But it is one thing to describe what 
once was; it is quite another to attempt to determine how 
it came about. 

There is not time on this occasion to attempt to trace the 
causes and gradual development of this genetic interest.^ 
The main reason for its present strength lies probably in 
our modern lively consciousness of the reality and inevita- 
bility of change, examples of which are continually forcing 
themselves upon our attention. The Greek historians had 
little or no background for their narratives. It is amazing 
to note the contemptuous manner in which Thucydides 
rejects all accounts of even the immediately preceding gen- 
eration, as mere uncertain traditions. Polybius set himself 
tlie task of tracing the gradual extension of the Roman 
dominion, but there is no indication that he had any clear 
idea of the continuity of history. In the Middle Ages 
there was undoubtedly a notion that the earth was the scene 
of a divine drama which was to culminate in the definitive 
separation of the wheat from the tares; but this super- 
natural unity of history was not scientific but theological. 
In earthly matters the mediaeval man could hardly have 
understood the meaning of the word, anachronism; the 
painters of the Renaissance did not hesitate to place a 
crucifix over the manger of the divine infant and there 
was nothing incongruous in this to their contemporaries. 
Not until the eighteenth century did the possibility of 

15 



r 



indeiinite human progress become the exhilarating doctrine 
of reformers, a class which had previously attacked exist- 
ing abuses in the name of the "good old times." No dis- 
covery could be more momentous and fundamental than 
that reform should seek its sanction in the future, not in 
the past; in advance, not in reaction. It became clearer 

'^ and clearer that the world did change, and by the middle of 
the nineteenth century the continuity of history began to 
be accepted by the more thoughtful students of the past 
and began to affect as never before their motives and 
methods of research. 

The doctrine of the continuity of history is based uj)on 
the observed fact that every human institution, every gen- 
erally accepted idea, every important invention, is but the 
summation of long lines of progress, reaching back as far 
as we have the patience or means to follow them. The 
jury, the drama, the gatling gun, the papacy, the letter 
"s," the doctrine of transubstantiation, each owes its present 
form to antecedents which can be scientifically traced. But 
no human interest is isolated from innumerable concurrent 
interests and conditioning circumstances. This brings us 
to the broader conception of the continuity of change which 

1 is attributable to the complexity of men's affairs. A some- 
what abrupt change may take place in some single institu- 
tion or habit but a sudden general change is almost incon- 
ceivable. An individual may, through some modification 
of his environment, through bereavement of malignant 
disease, be quickly and fundamentally metamorphosed, 
but even such cases are rare. If all the habits and interests 
of the individual are considered it will be found that only 
in the most exceptional cases are any great number of these 
altered in the twinkling of an eye. And society is infinitely 
more conservative than the individual, for reasons which 
need not be reviewed here. Now — and this cannot be too 
strongly emphasized — the continuity of history is a sci- 

16 



entific truth, the attempt to trace the slow process of 
change is a scientific problem, and one of the most fascinat- 
ing in its nature. It is the discovery and application of 
this law which has served to differentiate history from liter- 
ature and morals and raise it in one sense to the dignity of 
a science. 

Earlier lectures in this course have made plain the tre- 
mendous importance of the developmental treatment in 
nearly all the branches of natural science. It is equally new 
and equally revolutionary in its application to humanity. 
The older historians had little inclination to describe famil- 
iar conditions and the common routine of everyday life? 
It was the startling and exceptional that caught their 
attention and which they found recorded in the sources 
upon which they depended. They were like a geologist 
who should deal only with earthquakes and volcanoes, or 
better still, a zoologist who should have no use for any 
thing smaller than an elephant or less picturesque in its 
habits than a phoenix or a basilisk. An appreciation of the 
overwhelming significance of the small, the common and 
the obscure establishes the brotherhood of all scientific i 
workers whatever their fields of activity. 

History has so long been concealed behind a mask which 
has served either to enhance the charm of her homely fea- 
tures beyond all recognition, or to render her familiar and 
commonplace form monstrous and repulsive, that it is little 
wonder that historians only slowly adjust themselves to the 
new point of view. The first and greatest contribution to 
the scientific study of history came from an unexpected 
source and was again a clear reflection of the dominant 
practical exigencies of the time. Perhaps Buckle was right 
when he declared that the historians have on the whole been 
inferior in point of intellect to thinkers in other fields. At 
any rate it was a philosopher, economist and reformer, not 
a professional student of history, who suggested a wholly 

17 



new and wonderful series of questions which the historian 
might properly ask about the past, and moreover furnished 
him with a scientific explanation of many matters hitherto 
ill-understood. I mean Karl Marx. 

In a singular pamphlet called "The Holy Family," 
written in 1845, Marx denounced those who discover the 
birthplace of history in the shifting clouds of heaven in- 
stead of in the hard, daily work on earth. He maintained that 
the only sound and ever valid general explanation of the 
past wa's economic. The history of society depends, he 
held, upon the methods by which its members produce 
their means of support and exchange the products of in- 
dustry among themselves. The methods of production 
and transportation determine the methods of exchange, 
the distribution of products, the division of society into 
classes, the relations of the several classes, the existence 
of the State, the character of its laws, and of all that 
it means for mankind. We are not concerned here with 
the complicated genesis of this idea, nor with the pre- 
cise degree of originality to be attributed to Marx's pre- 
sentation of it. Nor is there time to explain the manner in 
which Marx's theory was misused by himself and his fol- 
lowers. Few, if any, historians would agree that every- 
thing can be explained economically, as many of the 
socialists and some economists of good standing would 
have us believe. But in the sobered and chastened form in 
which most economists now receive the doctrine, it serves to 
explain far more of the phenomena of the past than any 
other single explanation ever offered. It is the econo- 
mist who has opened up the most fruitful new fields of 
research by emphasizing the importance of the endur- 
ing but often inconspicuous factors which almost entirely 
escaped historians before the middle of the nineteenth 
century. I am inclined to think that Jaures, one of the 
leaders of the French socialists, has written what is, on the 

18 



whole, the most ilkimiiiating history of the French Revolu- 
tion. Moreover he has induced the French government to ap- 
point a commission to investigate and edit the chief sources 
for the economic history of that great movement. No one 
can glance at the volimies that have recently been appearing 
in that series without realizing the fundamental character of 
the material they contain as compared with similar series is- 
sued under the influence of the older canons of importance. 
It was inevitable that attempts would be made to reduce ) 
history to a science by reconstructing it upon the lines sug- 
gested by the natural sciences. The most celebrated in- 
stance of this is Buckle's uncompleted "History of Civiliza- 
tion," the first volume of which appeared in 1857. It 
seemed to him that while the historical material which had 
been collected, when looked at in the aggregate, had "a rich 
and imposing appearance," the real problem of the his- 
torian had hardl}^ been suspected, let alone solved. "For 
all the higher purposes of human thought," he declares, 
"history is still miserabty deficient, and presents tliat con- 
fused and anarchical appearance natural to a subject of 
which the laws are unknown and even the foundations un- 
settled." He accordingly hoped, he tells us, to "accomplish 
for the history of man something equivalent, or at all events 
analogous, to what has been effected by other inquirers for 
the different branches of natural science. In regard to 
nature, events apparently the most irregular and capricious 
have been explained, and have been shown to be in accord- 
ance with certain fixed and universal laws. This has been 
done because men of ability, and, above all, men of patient, 
imtiring thought, have studied natural events with the view 
of discovering their regularity ; and if human events were 
subjected to a similar treatment, we have every right to 
expect similar results." Buckle proposed to discover the 
laws, physical and mental, which govern the workings of 
mankind and then trace their operations in the general de- 

19 



velopment of civilization. Unlike Marx, Buckle believed 
that physical laws tended to become well-nigh inoperative 
in so highly developed a civilization as that of Europe and 
that, consequently, the moral and intellectual laws should 
constitute the main object of the historian's search. 

Fifty years have elapsed since Buckle's book appeared, 
and I know of no historian who would venture to maintain 
that we had made any considerable advance toward the 
goal he set for himself. A systematic prosecution of the 
various branches of social science, especially political econ- 
omy and anthropology, perhaps of psychology, — if that be 
a social science — has served to explain some things, but 
history must always remain, from the standpoint of the 
astronomer, physicist or chemist, a highly inexact and 
fragmentary body of knowledge. This is due mainly to 
the fact that it concerns itself with man, his devious ways 
and wandering desires, which it seems hopeless at present 
to bring within the compass of clearly defined laws of any 
kind. Then our historical knowledge must forever rest 
upon scattered and highly precarious data, the truth of 
which we have no means of testing. This melancholy fact 
is not so well known as it should be, for in writing for the 
public even conscientious scholars have hitherto found 
themselves suppressing their doubts and uncertainties until 
they were scarcely aware that they ever had them ; conceal- 
ing their pitiful ignorance and yielding to the temptation 
to ignore j^awning gulfs at whose brink History must halt 
even though Literature can bridge them with ease. I should 
like to dwell for a moment on this painful theme of our 
ineluctable ignorance over which Literature has been wont 
to throw a kindly veil. For it is to a considerable extent an 
exaggerated notion of the extent of our knowledge that 
has encouraged the reckless ventures of those who have 
dreamed of reducing history to an exact science. 

Fifty years ago it was generally believed that we knew 

20 



something about man from the very first. Of his abrupt 
appearance on the freshly created earth and his early con- 
duct, there appeared to be a brief but exceptionally author- 
itative account. Now we are beginning to recognize the 
immense antiquity of man. There are paleolithic imple- 
ments which there is some reason for supposing may have 
been made a hundred and fifty thousand years ago; the 
eolithic remains recently discovered may perhaps antedate 
the paleolithic by an equally long period. Mere guesses 
and impressions, of course, this assignment of millenniums, 
which appear to have been preceded by some hundreds of 
thousands of years during which an animal was developing 
with "a relatively enormous brain case, a skilful hand and 
an inveterate tendency to throw stones, flourish sticks" and, 
in general, as Ray Lankester expresses it, "to defeat ag- 
gression and satisfy his natural appetites by the use of his 
wits rather than by strength alone." There may still be 
historians who would argue that all this has nothing to do 
with history;— that it is "prehistoric." But "prehistoric" is 
a word that must go the way of "preadamite," which we 
used to hear. They both indicate a suspicion that we are in 
some way gaining illicit information about what happened 
before the foot lights were turned on and the curtain rose 
on the great human drama. Of the so-called "prehistoric" 
period we of course know as yet very little indeed, but the 
bare fact that there was such a period constitutes in itself 
the most momentous of historical discoveries. The earliest, 
somewhat abundant, traces of mankind can hardly be 
placed earlier than six thousand years ago. They indicate, 
however, a very elaborate and advanced civilization and it 
is quite gratuitous to assume that they represent the first 
occasions on which man rose to such a stage of culture. 
Even if they do, the wonderful tale of how the conditions 
of which we find hints in Babylonia, Egypt and Crete came 
about is lost. 

21 



Let us suppose that there has been something worth say- 
ing about the deeds and progress of mankind during the 
past three hundred thousand years at least; let us sup- 
pose that we were fortunate enough to have the merest 
outline of such changes as have overtaken our race during 
that period, and that a single page were devoted to each 
thousand years. Of the three hundred pages of our little 
manual the closing six or seven only would be allotted to 
the whole period for which records, in the ordinary sense of 
the word, exist, even in the scantiest and most fragmentary 
form. Or, to take another illustration, let us imagine his- 
tory under the semblance of a vast lake into whose rather 
turbid depths we eagerly peer. We have reason to think it 
at least twenty-five feet deep, perhaps fifty or a hundred ; 
we detect the very scantiest remains of life, rara et disjecta, 
four or five feet beneath the surface, six or seven inches 
down these are abundant, but at that depth we detect, so to 
speak, no movements of animate things, which are scarcely 
perceptible below three or four inches. If we are frank 
with ourselves we shall realize that we can have no clear 
and adequate notion of anything happening more than an 
inch, — indeed, scarce more than half an inch below the sur- 
face. 

From this point of view the historian's gaze, instead of 
sweeping back into remote ages when the earth was young, 
seems noM^ to be confined to his own epoch, Rameses the 
Great, Tiglath-Pileser and»Solomon appear practically co- 
eval with Caesar, Constantine, Charlemagne, St. Louis, 
Charles V, and Victoria; Bacon, Newton, and Darwin are 
but the younger contemporaries of Thales, Plato, and Aris- 
totle. Let those pause who attempt to determine the laws 
of human progress or decay. It is like trying to determine 
by observing the conduct of a man of forty for a month, 
whether he be developing or not. Anything approaching 
a record of events does not reach back for more than three 

22 



thousand years and even this remains shockingly imperfect 
and unrehable for more than two millenniums. We have a 
few, often highty fragmentary, literary histories covering 
Greek and Roman times, also a good many inscriptions and 
some important archeological remains ; but these leave us in 
the dark upon many vital matters. The sources for the Ro- 
man Empire are so very bad that Mommsen refused to at- 
tempt to write its history. Only in the twelfth and thirteenth 
centuries do the mediaeval annals and chronicles begin to 
be supplemented by miscellaneous documents which bring 
us more directly into contact with the life of the time. 

Yet the reader of history must often get the impres- 
sion that the sources of our knowledge are, so to 
speak, of a uniform volume and depth, at least 
for the last two or three thousand years. When he beholds 
a voluminous account of the early Church, or of the 
Roman Empire, or observes Dahn's or Hodgkin's 
many stately volumes on the Barbarian invasions, 
he is to be pardoned for assuming that the writers 
have spent years in painfully condensing and giving liter- 
ary form to the abundant material which they have turned 
up in the course of their prolonged researches. Too few 
suspect that it has been the business of the historian in the 
past not to condense but on the contrary skilfully to inflate 
his thin film of knowledge until the bubble should reach 
such proportions that its bright hues would attract the at- 
tention and elicit the admiration of even the most careless 
observer. One volume of Hodgkin's rather old fashioned 
"Italy and her Invaders," had the scanty material been ju- 
diciously compressed, might have held all that we can be 
said to even half -know about the matters to which the 
author has seen fit to devote eight volumes. 

But pray do not jump to the conclusion that the histori- 
cal writer is a sinner above all men. In the first place, it 
should never be forgotten that he is by long tradition a 

23 



man of letters, and that that is not, after all, such a bad 
thing to be. In the second place he experiences the same 
strong temptation that everyone else does to accept, at 
their face value, the plausible statements which he finds, un- 
less they conflict with other accounts of the same events or 
appear to be inlierently improbable. Lastly he is, like his 
fellow primates, the victim of what Nietzsche has called 
"dream logic." I am sure that we do not reckon constantly 
enough with this inveterate tendency of even a highly cul- 
tivated mind instinctively to elaborate and amplify mere 
hints and suggestions into complete and vivid pictures. 

To take an illustration of Nietzsche's, the vague feeling, 
as we lie in bed, that the soles of our feet are free from the 
usual pressure to which we are accustomed in our waking 
hours demands an explanation. Our dream explanation is 
that we must be flying. Not satisfied to leave its work half 
done, dream logic fabricates a room or landscape in which 
we make our aerial experiments. Moreover just as we are 
going to sleep or awaking we can often actually observe 
how a flash of light, such as sometimes appears on the 
retina of our closed eyes, will be involuntarily interpreted 
as a vision of some human figure or other object, clear as a 
stereopticon slide. Now anyone can demonstrate to him- 
self that neither dream logic nor the "mind's-eye faculty," 
as it has been called, desert us when we are awake. Indeed 
they may well be, as Nietzsche suspects, a portion of the 
inheritance bequeathed to us, along with some other incon- 
veniences, by our brutish forebears. At any rate they are 
forms of aberration against which the historian, with his 
literary traditions, needs specially to be on his guard. 
There are rumors that even the student of natural science 
sometimes keeps his mind's eye too wide open, but he is by 
no means so likely as the historian to be misled bj^ dream 
logic. This is not to be ascribed necessarily to the superior 
self-restraint of the scientist but rather to the greater sim- 

24 



plicity of his task and the palpableness of much of his 
knowledge. The historian can almost never have any di- 
rect personal experience of the phenomena with which he 
deals. He only knows the facts of the past by the traces 
they have left. Now these traces are usually only the re- 
ports of someone who commonly did not himself have any 
direct experience of the facts and who did not even take the 
trouble to tell us where he got his alleged information. 
This is true of almost all the ancient and mediaeval histo- 
rians and annalists. So it comes about tKat *'the immense 
majority of the sources of information which furnish the 
historian with starting points for his reasoning are nothing 
else than traces of psychological operations" rather than 
direct traces of the facts. 

To take a single example from among thousands which 
might be cited, Gibbon tells us that after the death 
of Alaric in 410 "The ferocious character of the Barbarians 
was displayed in the funeral of the hero, whose valor and 
fortune they celebrated with mournful applause. By the 
labor of a captive multitude they forcibly diverted the 
course of the Busentinus, a small river that washes the 
walls of Consentia. The royal sepulchre, adorned with the 
splendid spoils and trophies of Rome, was constructed in 
the vacant bed ; the waters were then restored to their natu- 
ral channel, and the secret spot, where the remains of 
Alaric had been deposited, was for ever concealed by the in- 
human massacre of the prisoners who had been employed 
to execute the work." The basis of this account is the illit- 
erate "History of the Goths" written by an ignorant per- 
son, Jordanes, about a hundred and forty years after the 
occurrence of the supposed events. We know that Jor- 
danes copied freely from a work of his better instructed 
contemporary, Cassiodorus, which has been lost. This is 
absolutely all that we know about the sources of our infor- 
mation. 

25 



Shall we believe this story which has found its way 
into so many of our textbooks? Gibbon did not witness 
the burial of Alaric nor did Jordanes, upon whose tale 
he greatly improves, nor did Cassiodorus who was not born 
until some eighty years after the death of the Gothic king. 
We can control the "psychological operation" represented 
in Gibbon's text, for he says he got the tale from Jordanes, 
but aside from our suspicion that Jordanes took 
the story from the lost book by Cassiodorus we have no 
means of controlling the various psychological opera- 
tions which separate the tale as we have it from 
the real circumstances. We have other reasons than 
Jordanes' authority for supposing that Alaric is dead, 
but as for the circumstances of his burial we can only say 
they may have been as described, but we have only the 
slightest reason for supposing that they were. The scope 
for dream logic and the mind's-eye faculty as well as for 
mistakes and misapprehensions of all kinds is in such cases 
infinitely greater than when one deals with his own impres- 
sions, which can be intensified and corrected by repeated 
observations and clarified by experiment. As Langlois re- 
marks, the historian is like a chemist who should be forced 
to rely for his knowledge of a series of experiments upon 
what his laboratory boy told him. 

It should now have become clear that history can never 
become a science in the sense that physics, chemistry, physi- 
ology, or even anthropology, is a science. The complexity 
of the phenomena is appalling and we have no way of arti- 
ficially analyzing and of experimenting with our facts. 
We know absolutely nothing of any occurrences in the his- 
tory of mankind during thousands of years and it is only 
since the invention of printing that our sources have be- 
come in any sense abundant. Historical students have 
moreover become keenly aware of the "psychological opei- 
ations" which separate them from the objective facts of the 

26 



past. They know that all narrative sources, upon which 
former historians so naively relied, are open to the gravest 
suspicion and that even the documents and inscriptions 
which they prize more highly are nevertheless liable to 
grave misinterpretation. 

s But if there is no hope that history can become a science 
in the sense in which the term is usually accepted, why 
should it not resign itself to remaining, as it always has 
been essentially, a branch of literature? Since all depart- 
ments of knowledge have now become historical, what need 
is there of history in general? If politics, war, art, law, re- 
ligion, science, literature, be dealt with geneticallj^ will not 
history tend inevitably to disintegrate into its organic ele- 
ments? Professor Seeley of the University of Cambridge 
believed that it would. Twenty years ago he declared that 
history was after all but the name of "a residuum which has 
been left when one group of facts after another has been 
taken possession of by some science ; that residuum which 
now exists must go the way of the rest, and that time is not 
very distant when a science will take possession of the facts 
which are still the undisputed property of the historian." 

Now the last question I have to discuss is whether his- 
tory, after gaining the whole world, is destined to lose her 
own soul. Let us assume that historical specialization has 
done its perfect work, that every distinct phase of man's 
])ast, every institution, sentiment, conception, discovery, 
achievement or defeat which is recorded has found its place 
in the historical treatment of the particular branch of re- 
search to which it has been assigned according to the pre- 
vailing classification of the sciences. This process of spe- 
cialization would serve to rectify history in a thousand 
ways, and to broaden and deepen its operations, but, instead, 
of destroying it, it would rather tend, on the contrary, to 
demonstrate with perfect clearness its absolute indispensa- 
bility. Human affairs and human change do not lend 

27 



themselves to an exhaustive treatment through a series of 
monographs upon the ecclesiastical or military organiza- 
tion of particular societies, their legal procedure, agrarian 
system, their art, domestic habits or views on higher educa- 
tion. Many vital matters would prove highly recalcitrant 
when one attempted to force them into a neat scientific 
cubby-hole. Physical, moral and intellectual phenomena 
are mysteriously interacting in that process of life and 
change which it falls to the historian to study and describe. 

Man is far more than the sum of his scientifically classi- 
fiable operations. Water is composed of hydrogen and 
oxygen, but it is not like either of them. Nothing could be 
more artificial than the scientific separation of man's 
religious, aesthetic, economic, political, intellectual and bel- 
licose properties. These may be studied, each by itself, 
with advantage, but specialization would lead to the most 
\ absurd results if there were not someone to study the pro- 
cess as a whole ; and that someone is the historian. Imagine 
the devotees of the various social sciences each engaged in 
describing his particular interest in the Crusades or the 
Protestant Revolt or the French Revolution. When they 
had finished would not the historian have to retell the story 
in his way, utilizing all that they had accomplished, includ- 
ing what they had all omitted, and rectifying the errors 
into which each of the specialists had fallen on account of 
his ignorance of the general situation? The historian will 
moreover engage in his own kind of specialization. He no 
longer confines himself to cross sections of the past but 
traces ideas and institutions morphogenetically — if I may 
be permitted to borrow that polite term. 

As for his ignorance, which I have so frankly revealed, 
he now recognizes that in all humilitj^ and is making every 
effort to remedy it by the application of highly scientific 
methods. He shares it moreover with the representatives of 
all the social sciences who attempt to carry their work back 

28 



into the past. The historian will become more and more in- 
terested, I believe, in explaining the immediate present and 
fortunately his sources for the immediately preceding two 
or three centuries are infinitely more abundant and satis- 
factory than for the whole earlier history of the world. He 
is criticizing and indexing his sources and rendering them 
available to an extent which would astonish a layman un- 
familiar with the tremendous amount that has been accom- 
plished in this wa}^ during the past fifty years. Every year 
adds to our resources here in New York Citj^ material that 
was formerly out of reach of even the most assiduous Euro- 
pean scholar. Every j^ear witnesses important additions to 
our knowledge of our own national history. 

We have now seethed the kid in its mother's milk. We 
ha^^e explained History by means of History. The histo- 
rian is from a narrow scientific point of view a little higher 
than a man of letters and a good deal lower than an astron- 
omer or biologist. He need not however repudiate his lit- 
erary associations, for they are eminently respectable, but he 
will aspire hereafter to find out not onl}^ exactly how things 
have been but how they have come about. He will remain 
the critic and guide of the social sciences whose results he 
must synthesize and test by the actual life of mankind as it 
appears in the past. His task is so grand and so compre- 
hensive that it will doubtless gradually absorb his whole 
energies and wean him in time from literature, for no poet 
or dramatist ever set before himself a nobler or a more in- 
spiring ideal, or one making more demands upon the imag- 
ination and resources of expression, than the destiny which 
is becoming clearer and clearer to the historian. 



29 



\^if<5 



COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS 



A SERIES of twenty-two lectures descriptive in untechnical language of 
the achievements in Science, Philosophy and Art, and indicating the 
present status of these subjects as concepts of human knowledge, are being 
delivered at Columbia University, during the academic year 1907-1908, by 
various professors chosen to represent the several departments of instruction. 

MATHEMATICS, by Cassius Jackson Keyser, Adrain Professor of Mathe- 

viatics. 

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guages. 

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